Mulling over David Bowie's 'Where Are We Now?'

Thursday

Jan 10, 2013 at 7:00 PMJan 10, 2013 at 7:20 PM

It's terribly odd, listening to David Bowie's much discussed new single, “Where Are We Now?” It's a different Bowie than we've heard before. But then, it always has been, hasn't it? “Space Oddity” and “Ziggy Stardust” were grand bits of theater. “Modern Love” took a lot of his earlier themes and brought them into the pop mainstream. Tin Machine, the band he fronted from '89 to '91, seemed like something of an interesting failure at the time, although in retrospect the music was far better than was credited.

He's been chilling, and he's been ridiculous, and for the past decade, he's been effectively gone, only to re-emerge on his 66th birthday, posing the question, “Where Are We Now?”

“Sitting in the Dschungel,” sings Bowie, in a voice that's unnervingly tentative — wavering a tad, but still beautiful. “On Nurnberger strasse/A man lost in time near KaDeWe/Just walking the dead.”

On Facebook, a friend referred to the song as “ponderous,” using the term as a pejorative, but here's the thing. It is ponderous. It's a brooding little song about getting older, about not knowing where you stand anymore. Bowie takes the persona of an old man, shuffling through the streets of Berlin — the very city where, 40 years previously, he was both at his wildest and near the apex of his creative powers.

And through it all, that question echoes: “Where are we now?” For an artist as storied as Bowie, it's probably the only question worth asking … particularly as he shuffles around his metaphoric past.

John Lydon of the Sex Pistols once noted that what was endearing at 20 was “pathetic at 40,” and honestly, there's something disingenuous about a good many of the Dinosaurs of Rock that have been parading for decades from stadium to stadium. Oh, some can pull it off, certainly. But the ones that do are the ones that seem to have grown and changed as artists and as people. When Bruce Springsteen puts out a new album, you don't really have a sense that he's trying to relive his “Glory Days.” The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith? It's sacrilege, surely, but it's hard not to see a sort of stagnation in their most recent works. (Clearly, some of my colleagues disagree on that point. Which is fine.) It's not that these aren't talented musicians and performers. It's just that, by adhering to a slavishness of work that was at its freshest 40 years ago, one can't help but wonder if fans haven't been robbed of more mature work that resonates with the listener's present, and not just the memories of their youth.

Eh. It's just an idle thought. It probably would have been a flop — Like Tin Machine, which only seems to make sense 20-something years later, the song “Working Class Hero” seeming more in time now than it did before.

And where are we now? Where is Bowie now, as he unabashedly sings an old man's song, laden with German street names and nostalgia for a wild youth? Would we accept this Bowie if he came back with a “greatest hits” tour, reclaiming the mantle of Ziggy Stardust or any of the other roles he's worn in the past?

This song, and the melancholy question at its heart, seems to reject that prospect. “Where Are We Now?” is a difficult song to love on first listen. It's devoid of a lot of pop music's tricks and hooks. But there's an emotional resonance that burns through this song's simple melody and lyrics, a flicker of flame that seems to indicate that this is not just an attempt to retread old ground. Rather, in its understated directness and quiet insistence, it seems that Bowie here has dropped all the costumes and characters entirely. That he's being square with us, for what may very well be the first time.